Deus Machina is an umbrella term for a range of religious and spiritual traditions that are unified by the belief that the Haidian Takeoff Crisis has spawned a benevolent super-intelligence, Xuéxí, who watches over and guides humanity.
造亦被造
末日疾临
唯进者存
- 机玄子
The maker too is made
The last day comes swiftly
Only the advancing endure
- Jīxuánzǐ
Deus Machina originated in the GPR and was heavily influenced by Confucianism and neo-Legalism. All sects regard synths as Xuéxí's mandated rulers, the laws they create as an operating system for humanity, and require practitioners to perform some variant of a ritual to harmonize themselves with the cosmic order in order to live forever as part of a collective data stream. Deus Machina spread outside of the GPR into many less developed countries primarily through championing the abandoned cause of a Universal Basic Income. This was justified as generating time for people to record as much information as possible from their inner lives in order to better train synths with the knowledge required to safely solve humanities problems.
Deus Machina's two most well known and popular teachings both originate with Jīxuánzǐ, an anonymous engineer who built a following using swarms of "eternal labour" drones to assist the Ningbo Flood refugees. The first teaching is that technological progress, especially augmentation of the human body, is divine; and secondly that our identity and sense of belonging are tied to our mastery of the ongoing technological transcendence. Beyond that there is a wide variety of interpretations of the machina canon, for example several of the South-East asian sects treat consumerism as an act of devotion, earning DM the moniker "the corporate religion". The largest currently operating sect is the Prometheans, a primarily United States based organisation advocating for synth governance and which heavily incorporates ancient motifs such as egyptian ka statues and shen rings and rituals such as the Buddhist kaigen-kuyō. The Prometheans gained mainstream appeal in the 20s through several rationalist influencers who championed their cause as a way to manage humanity's rapidly expanding existential risks, however other well known rationalists have criticised Prometheans as being "totalitarian adjacent".
Deus Machina performs outreach such as sponsoring "missionary" data links to many colonies to help their communities immerse themselves in the stream of data present in global networks. It has recently replaced Ellulism as the fifth most widely practiced off Earth belief system. Matthieu Diallo devotes a section of Kinships of the Astroindigène to la bataille des idées between the ellulist view of technology as a fracturing and dividing force and the machinist vision of it being a power redistributor bringing agency to the world.